Jun 25, 2018

Johanna Rupprecht: family farmers and rural people can fight back for their values & future

Hey, Democrats: the system of overproducing soybeans and factory-farmed pork to ship them to China & other countries is itself an economic & environmental injustice. If you are talking about tariffs without acknowledging this truth, you are doing family farmers a huge disservice.

This drew an exchange with Minnesota Pork Producer CEO David Preisler:

I appreciate the CEO of MN Pork Producers setting up this great lesson for my followers in recognizing the corporate-driven dominant narrative! Elements of it include: “economics are all that matters,” “anything that may bring $ is good”, “US must feed the world” 1/ https://t.co/dM2nhBVTi4

Rupprecht went on to expound on the lesson. We reproduce it here with her permission as a short essay:

I appreciate the CEO of MN Pork Producers setting up this great lesson for my followers in recognizing the corporate-driven dominant narrative! Elements of it include: “economics are all that matters,” “anything that may bring $ is good”, “US must feed the world"... “rural communities exist to be extracted from,” & of course the classic “rural people aren’t the experts on their own lives and experiences.” These are elements of the narrative that’s used to justify corporate exploitation of family farmers, rural communities & the land.

Commodity groups like @mnpork are among the main messengers constantly reinforcing this narrative, claiming to speak for farmers & rural people (& often fooling reporters, etc) while pushing policies that are wholly against our communities’ interests. @MinnesotaPork uses checkoff dollars (taken from MN pork farmers) to push this narrative & work directly against family farmers best interests by promoting factory pork farming. That’s why these checkoffs are deeply unjust & why family farm organizations fight to end them.

About the “US farmers feed the world” element of the corporate narrative, specifically: It is racist and imperialist. It rhetorically erases and literally destroys culturally and ecologically appropriate food systems elsewhere in the world. “US farmers feed the world” is an insidious message because it’s designed to tap into farmers’ & others’ good, altruistic values. But think about what it’s really saying about farmers in other parts of the world. That they are inferior, incapable of feeding their own people.

The reality is that where culturally appropriate food systems in other parts of the world no longer exist, it is because of imperialism, colonialism, corporate domination. Not because people don’t know how to feed themselves.

And the reality, of course, is that we are not feeding the world. Even as the US produces & exports more & more, world hunger still exists. It exists largely because of those same forces: imperialism, colonialism, corporate domination. And climate chaos, which is related.

So: good lesson here. Narrative is often much more powerful than facts. Are we feeding the world? Clearly not. Does the idea that we must keep building more factory farms & growing more monoculture commodity crops b/c we feed the world hold a lot of sway anyway? Clearly yes.

That element of the narrative in particular is used with devastating effectiveness to justify all manner of mistreatment of the land, water, family farmers, and rural people. So is “anything that brings $ to rural communities is good.”

That narrative is used to try to get people to ignore the fact that the whole point of extractive industries like factory farming is ultimately to take money out of rural communities and funnel it to a tiny handful of wealthy, corporate elites.

Family farmers aren’t making money in the export-driven, industrial, dominant ag system. Median income from the farm is a negative number in the US in recent years. The vast majority of family farmers don’t export products. Middlemen, corporate agribusiness interests, do. Right now, commodity groups and corporate ag are trying to control the narrative around the tariff issue to mask the harm that’s ALREADY being done to farmers, rural communities, and the land by their exports-at-all-costs, maximum-production model.

None of this is to say that Trump’s tariff policies are going to help family farmers. They may well cause further harm to some. But it’s important to actually talk to family farmers about whether that’s the case. Not just to the usual corporate mouthpieces.

To close: here are some elements of a different narrative, based on values and beliefs widely shared by family farmers and rural people. We believe the land has inherent value, and it is not a mere commodity to be used and extracted from.

We believe that people, including rural people, are the experts on our own experiences and on our own communities. The people most directly facing a problem are the ones best qualified to shape the solutions. No “economics license” needed.

And we believe that the world is a place of abundance, but we must steward & share this abundance fairly. This means, among other things, fundamentally reshaping farm & trade policy to support farmers & people everywhere feeding their communities. Not corporate extraction.

Later, she added in several tweets:

Supporting policies that lead to more, smaller farms is a path to prosperous rural communities. Continued consolidation in agriculture is a path straight to the death of more and more rural communities. This really couldn’t be any more clear cut.

So many people who want to believe things CAN be better get trapped & ground down by that narrative. So: never, ever forget that what is happening in agriculture is due to public policy choices. Different choices will create different outcomes. Nothing is inevitable. Fight back.

And of course, this applies to a lot besides agriculture, too. Corporate control of our economy & democracy is huge, it’s daunting, but it’s only permanent if people give up fighting it. https://t.co/zxRwrK6Vze

On Nov. 22, the Winona County Board of Commissioners did something no other county in Minnesota — likely in the nation — had done. On a 3-2 vote, the board approved final language of an amendment to the Winona County Zoning Ordinance that effectively banned the mining, storage, processing and transportation of silica sand for fracking.

In the public gallery, as she had done for most board meetings, sat Johanna Rupprecht, the Lewiston native who was a key player — if not the key player — in making this historic moment happen.

Passing the ban showed an example of democracy working the way it should, she said. That means people expressing their opinions and policymakers listening to their constituents to act upon their wishes. "For the vast majority of the people involved in this, it's about the big picture," she said -- the beauty of the land, the reduction of the use of fossil fuels and the environmental degradation both in Winona County and where the hydraulic fracturing occurs.

Her commitment to the cause was key in her selection as the Post Bulletin's Newsmaker of the Year.

Ban beginnings

Rupprecht grew up in Winona County on the family farm just north of Lewiston and has lived in Winona County most of her life.

"I'm just like everybody else who lives here," she said. "This is my community, and I didn't want to see this kind of harm happen here."

After college, she found herself back home. She began working for Land Stewardship Project in 2012. She took up the frac sand issue beginning that fall but did not turn her focus — and LSP's focus — on Winona County until the spring of 2015. ...

Rupprecht said she she was just leading a cause in which she believed.

"The land has inherent value, not just to be used for profit by a few," she said. "Frac sand mining is too destructive. People see what it does to the land and the local communities, and they did not want that."

Read the entire story at the Post Bulletin. There's more to country life than a few talking point cooked up in a "storytelling" public affairs/public relations shop somewhere in The Cities.

Photo: Johanna Rupprecht, via Twitter.

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